He was a package of paradoxes. He admired women, yet never married. A filmmaker, he never owned a camera. He loved music, but never took up an instrument. During his career as an artist, however, Joseph Cornell focused his relentless energy on collecting bits of paper, dime-store toys and natural objects, such as stones and seashells. He arranged these objects in glass-fronted boxes reminiscent of the "shadow boxes" favored in Victorian-era homes for showing off accumulations of precious minutia.

A prolific artist, Cornell, who died in 1972 at age 69, all but invented boxes as art, a form much admired and occasionally borrowed by surrealists and pop artists.

The challenge faced by Joseph Cornell authority Lynda Roscoe Hartigan in putting together the second major Cornell retrospective since his death--the exhibition "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," on view through Feb. 19 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.--was figuring out how to present the 177 widely varied Cornell artworks. Many were borrowed from Cornell aficionados from around the world.

"It was a great puzzle," says Hartigan, chief curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and co-organizer of the Cornell exhibition. "Putting together an exhibition is a very creative act. One must come up with a concept, decide how best to visualize it and organize the material around ideas. I spent a lot of time arranging and rearranging images of Cornell’s works on my dining room table, deciding whether something worked better over here or over there.

During the two months leading up to the exhibition opening, Hartigan worried "that people wouldn’t get the 'conversations,'" she says, referring to the cross-references she sought to suggest by thoughtful juxtapositions of disparate pieces.

But her worries were unsubstantiated. When the exhibition opened, "it was gratifying that people would look at the works for a long time and then say things like, 'I never thought of it in that way' and 'It’s great to see such different combinations, related ideas and visual elements, to look at such great conversations.' These comments were music to my ears," Hartigan says.

Joseph Cornell was a late bloomer as an artist. Born into an old, distinguished and sometimes rich American family, he struggled, from age 18, to provide for his family after his father died. He cared for both his mother and younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy.

A self-taught artist, Cornell drew on themes suggested by his restless, wide-ranging curiosity about the natural world and the world of art. He read incessantly. His interests ranged from 17th-century English metaphysical poet John Donne to contemporary French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. He had a special affection for the American transcendentalist poet Emily Dickinson.

Rarely venturing beyond the borders of his native New York, Cornell took long meandering walks from his wooden frame house in a modest area of Queens. He haunted Manhattan bookstores and art galleries and the theater district, where he formed worshipful relationships with actresses, ballerinas (ballet was another of Cornell’s great passions) and movie stars, including Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamar and Greta Garbo. Cornell used images of these women in his artful boxes.

Hartigan has been a Cornell scholar for more than 20 years, while working as chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she was founding curator of the museum’s Joseph Cornell Study Center. The center was established in 1978 when Cornell’s sister and brother-in-law donated a collection of his works and related documentary material to the Smithsonian.

The first major posthumous Cornell retrospective, mounted in 1980 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was organized chronologically, exploring Cornell’s development as an artist from beginning to end.

For this exhibition, Hartigan took a thematic approach, dividing Cornell’s work into 10 sections. The introductory "Navigating a Career" provides an overview of Cornell’s evolution as an artist.

"Cabinets of Curiosity," "Dream Machines," "Nature’s Theater," "Geographies of the Heavens," "Bouquets of Homage," "Crystal Cages" and "Chambers of Time" each explore recurring themes of his work.

The section "Wonderland" is composed of a selection of source material drawn from the Joseph Cornell Study Center.

Finally, "Movie Palace" displays a selection of Cornell’s experimental films. Like much of his other art, none of the film images were originally created by Cornell. Instead, he took bits and pieces of film shot by others and spliced them together in new ways.

"I’d already done a tremendous amount of research on Cornell and his work," Hartigan says. "This show was a chance to read his art more broadly in terms of concepts like memory and vision, the relationships between art and science, what Cornell did with those subjects and how he interpreted them. I was able to really reflect on what I’d learned and been thinking about over the years."

After its Smithsonian debut, "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" will be on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., from April 28 to Aug. 19 and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from Oct. 6 to Jan. 6, 2008.